# Graham Treakle

Graham Treakle runs businesses and builds AI-supported workflows for business operations, including sales follow-up, CRM tasks, performance reporting, and daily planning.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/graham-treakle/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/graham-treakle-ab378a6
- LinkedIn followers: 3,398
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, sales
- Based on 9 dated posts, latest 2026-10-08

## Summary

Practical AI workflow content for small-business operations, especially sales follow-up, CRM tasks and daily reporting.

- Best for: A CRM or sales tool vendor selling to small businesses with about 5 to 50 staff.
- Not for: Enterprise AI governance, data security, or keynote work on regulatory compliance and risk.
- Check first: Confirm audience demographics, partnership terms, and independent verification for reported gains.

### Takeaways

- AI is more useful as recurring jobs than as a chatbot.
- Quote follow-up drafts email for review and sending, saving about 30 minutes daily.
- Over 20 recurring tasks became hard to manage as errors and failed runs increased.

## Main ideas

- **AI is more useful as recurring jobs than as a chatbot**: Treakle’s central claim is that AI’s bottleneck is remembering to ask, so the fix is scheduled work with dedicated context that runs whether or not you think of it. Each job is small; the payoff is cumulative. The post lists four main Claude workflows: an AI project manager that checks other AI projects at 5:30 AM, flags issues and returns one consolidated status report; a Monday weekly performance report built on a Project holding the right KPIs and reporting structure; a 5:50 PM daily productivity scorecard; and a morning operations and profitability brief that reads the calendar and CRM for opportunities to watch, calls and emails to make, stale deals and daily priorities. Smaller jobs include a 7-day quote follow-up, daily inbox triage, a daily quote classifier and a subscription payment health check. Treakle’s summary: none is individually revolutionary, but together they remove a surprising amount of administrative friction.
- **Give AI jobs that make a difference, not just prompts**: Treakle’s lesson is that prompts and abstract jobs are not enough; jobs should change something real in a person’s life or business. This principle underpins treating AI as an operating layer rather than a tool to consult, and applies outside work as well as inside it.
- **AI should extend an existing discipline, not replace it**: Treakle trained in Franklin Covey planning after starting at Central Carolina Bank in 1998, used the official planners for nearly a decade, then adapted the system to journal-sized notebooks, with the schedule on the left page and the five most important tasks plus meeting notes on the right. The new Daily Profitability Plan keeps the printed page as the interface. Treakle still prints it, writes notes on it and checks items off one at a time, describing themselves as a list person. The morning plan consolidates the schedule, automation results, top priorities, messages waiting for approval, risks and items needing attention, and a sales pipeline snapshot, replacing checks across twenty different processes. Treakle frames AI not as a replacement for the discipline learned from Franklin Covey but as a way to apply it with better information.
- **Sales and CRM follow-up is where the savings are concrete**: Treakle ties AI to named sales stages and has it hand work back for human review rather than send on its own. A 7-day quote follow-up finds quotes needing follow-up and drafts the email; Treakle reviews, edits and sends it, saving about 30 minutes a day. A daily quote classifier organizes downloaded quotes, checks the CRM and verifies that each lead is in the correct automation, saving 10 to 15 minutes a day. A daily productivity scorecard tracks inbound calls answered and missed, outbound calls answered versus voicemail, response time to requests, emails and SMS sent by the system versus by Treakle, new opportunities, and opportunities won and closed. Treakle reports that lead quality, conversation rate, average sale and available time all improved after using AI more systematically.
- **Reliability, not capability, is the ceiling on scaling AI operations**: Treakle scaled from casual AI use to more than 20 recurring tasks across business and personal systems, then hit a wall: daily error messages and tasks that failed to run demanded more attention, and the setup was not keeping pace with the growth Treakle wanted. The response was to rebuild the whole stack, treat AI as a set of roles or employees, and start with a prompt asking an AI to act as an expert in business operations, strategy, growth and AI; recommend how many AI employees Treakle should have and what those roles should be; and help rewrite every project, artifact and scheduled item from scratch. The rebuild’s outcome is not described in the available posts.
- **Treakle’s open questions point toward data security and executive reporting**: Treakle asks the network for their best Claude Projects, scheduled tasks and workflows, naming sales, operations, CRM, productivity, data security and executive reporting as areas of interest. That’s a direction of travel, not a settled position; data security and executive reporting remain open questions.

## Work to read

- [Claude as an operating layer: recurring workflows that save time](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/graham-treakle-ab378a6_ive-been-using-claude-less-as-a-chatbot-activity-7498042754447577088-w_ub)
- [From Franklin Covey planner to AI profitability plan](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/graham-treakle-ab378a6_in-the-fall-of-1998-fresh-out-of-college-activity-7487860585670479872-oGf5)
- [Rebuilding an AI operations stack: sharing the prompt and the problem](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/graham-treakle-ab378a6_this-week-i-decided-it-was-time-to-rebuild-activity-7505962519610499074-hzj8)

## Brand relationships

- **Claude (Anthropic)** (mention)
- **Central Carolina Bank** (employment)
- **Franklin Covey** (mention)

## Partnerships

Graham Treakle's posts focus on their AI workflow systems for business operations, including scheduled reports, CRM follow-up, inbox triage, and daily planning. They do not describe sponsored placements, rates, audience packages, content requirements, or an official inquiry route. Before planning a campaign, ask directly about available partnership options and terms.

## Alternatives

- Lauren B. Jones: Choose Lauren B. Jones instead when the vendor's buyers are staffing and recruiting firms rather than general small businesses. The post speaks directly to staffing leaders and lists five ways Claude is used on a recruiting desk: a separate Claude Project per client, loaded once with job specs, rate cards, and meeting notes; turning a single intake-call transcript into five outputs (job description, candidate outreach email, client recap, interview questions, and a LinkedIn post); converting a top recruiter's submittal style into a reusable Skill so the whole desk writes to that standard; connecting email, calendar, and drive to a scheduled Monday morning update; and keeping the hiring call with people, not the model, on the stated grounds that even Anthropic does not let Claude make the hiring decision. Two things make this a strong swap for the same campaign decision. First, the draft-then-decide step the CRM vendor wants to show is stated plainly. Second, the post closes with a two-day live session schedule, so an event or webinar component can build on content that already has a registration hook.
- Chris Tveter: Choose Chris Tveter instead when the buyers are HubSpot-using sales teams or RevOps functions and the campaign is about AI that ships inside the CRM rather than a personal automation stack. One post walks through all eight pre-built skills of HubSpot's free Claude sales plugin and what each is for: call prep, a prioritized daily brief, logging a call by talking through it in plain language, drafting the recap email and saving it in HubSpot, pipeline pulse before a weekly review, contact lookup, CSV or pasted-list contact import with field mapping and deduplication, and a general lookups-and-updates catch-all. It also gives the vendor the key detail for addressing the trust objection: before Claude writes anything to the account, it shows the proposed change and asks for confirmation. A second post covers HubSpot Deal Progression in public beta, including the new Catch-Up tab, the requirement that conversation recording be on, configuration of MEDDIC, BANT, or SPICED with the tab showing which criteria are met, Deal Plans that generate a branded buyer portal without a HubSpot login, and a re-engage prompt after 14 days of silence. It flags a migration detail: under the default layout, the Overview tab is renamed About. That suits an enablement or change-management angle focused on what reps will actually see on Monday.
- Rich LeBrun: Choose Rich LeBrun instead when the campaign's buyer is a prospective small-business or franchise owner and the message is human judgment over full automation. The posts support that argument directly. One tells buyers to run franchise numbers as if a manager were already in place and to pay that role what it is worth, arguing that as technology takes over routine work, people who bring judgment, leadership, and real connection become more valuable. The other points to services people genuinely need, such as health and wellness, personal care, and specialized support, where technology can smooth scheduling and follow-up but customers still want a knowledgeable person in front of them. For a product whose selling point is that a person still approves the send, this is a useful supporting voice from someone who states 30 years owning and operating businesses.

---
AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/